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Mercents Best said that by choosing an installed-base tool such as Mercent, customers gain advantages such as connecting through XML Web services, XML file exchange, flat-file document exchange or direct database-to-database connection using ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) or SQL Server database transformation services.
Best, a former Amazon employee himself, said the Mercent Commerce System is a scalable application that facilitates the automated, scheduled exchange of product, order, inventory, fulfillment and settlement data between a merchants data center and consumer marketplaces Web services-based interfaces. The system scales to support more than 1 million orders per day, as well as catalogs with more than 500,000 SKUs, he said.

As a result, "weve seen a dramatic increase in sales since weve been working with their tool," Hamilton said.

Added Best, who said Mercent and its team of former Amazon employees have "deep domain expertise" in Amazon: "Weve made a significant investment in our technology as a service-oriented architecture platform. We provide native Web services interfaces."
Best touted his products integration capabilities and its ability to enable users to support several marketplaces from one solution.
"Mercent manages the business rules for all the data feeds that Car Toys exchanges with all the marketplaces they work with," Best said. "We provide the administration tools and information dashboards a system administrator would want."

In addition, Mercent provides Web services adapters for connections, for XML data validation and for the transformation of XML itself, Best said.
And in cases where there is a large payload, "we provide features like data streaming and data compression," Best said. "We also batch the data, if necessary, to make sure were not exceeding file size."
Car Toys implemented the Mercent solution in its data center in less than 30 days, Car Toys officials said. In addition, Best said Mercent is serious about its commitment to customers. "When you look at the amounts of money changing hands, we take our job of making sure the data gets back to the retailers seriously," he said.
Best called Car Toys an important customer for Mercent because "they are a local partner who worked with us on the development of the latest version of our software."
Mercent is considering adding more merchandising and business intelligence features to its software.
Check out eWEEK.coms Web Services Center for the latest news, reviews and analysis in Web services.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.